Solterra is remarkably peaceful for a kingdom with no leader.
Martell has heard of its bloody history in passing. It is a credit to Orestes, perhaps, that the streets aren’t erupting in violence now; from what he’s been told all the desert-born are prone to quick tempers and the love of a fight. Maybe they are all cowards underneath, though - maybe they have no interest in a throne whose previous holders had brief reigns that ended in death or disappearance.
It is hard not to wonder of his own city, his own people. Isra had left them with the rebels in charge, but how well would newly-freed slaves govern? It would not surprise him if they, too, had been slaughtered in the streets. Perhaps one of the lesser dukes had seized control; perhaps chaos gripped Elettra still.
His thoughts chase themselves down darker paths like dogs on rats as he moves through the narrow shelves of the royal library. He calls them to heel and out of habit they obey, but only just; he can still feel their breath, their teeth worrying their lips, when he stops before a book that lays open on a table. One of the attendants had pointed him here, to pages of history where the ink was still fresh enough to carry a scent. Still being written.
Martell turns each page, the papyrus so thin that sunlight shines through. He stops at the year marked 503.
But he cannot read the words.
Foreign markings, black-eyed, look up at him, sinuous as snakes and sharp as barbed arrows. The script is different than what he’d studied on the ship, by dim candlelight in the hold, by sunlight on the deck. He can only make out the names: Raum. Seraphina. Isra. Isra. Isra.
Inwardly he seethes. The letters swim before him, darkening, as a wasps-nest hum rises in his mind. The unicorn lifts his head before he can plunge his horn through the heart of the pages and swallows, hard. Out of the corner of his eye there is movement - a buckskin with spots of white, a dangerous-looking woman. Martell forces his voice to be calm as the surface of a mirror, his expression to be pliant.
“Excuse me,” he says to her, belly hot with fury and humiliation, a burning in his emerald eyes. “Could you tell me what this says, please? I - I can’t read it. But I need to know.”
" I KEEP SEARCHING THE STREETS FOR THAT / BLOOD-WINE BATTLESHIP SHE DRIVES. "
This man, whoever he is—today he has gotten lucky.
It’s unusual that O is in the city at all. Recently she’s been spending more and more time in Terrastella, sneaking into the castle to see Andi after hours, or watching her disappear into the waves while the sun sets over the beach. Recently, the carefully cobbled streets of the Dusk Court have become as familiar to her as the ones she grew up on; and nowadays, even in Solterra, she’s more likely to be caught at the oasis or talking to Tuchulcha in the desert. The inner city has lost its allure. Every corner, every building, is stained with memories she’s tired of looking at.
So her presence here—in the city as much as in the library—is a stroke of luck for Martell. Good or bad luck, that remains to be seen.
The building is oppressively quiet. O hears her breath, half-held, as loud as if it were the wind off the ocean; every step she takes clicks against the tile with an independent echo. Dust swirls lazy and light-gold through the air. The bookshelves rise high as mountains on every side, with the many-colored spines of books pressed against one another in infinite rows. It feels reverent, almost: this library is as silent and dim as any of the temples she has visited in service of any of the gods.
But whoever this is, the blood-red stallion she catches a glimpse of out of the corner—well, O knows from experience this is not what a reverend looks like. He has the same cunning, angry, and very explicitly godless expression she sees in the mirror each morning.
O comes to a stop a few feet away. All three eyes train on him, and the fierceness of their kaleidoscope colors serves the same purpose as the bright pigments in a poisonous animal—a warning.
“Well,” she says. “What is it that you want to know?”
He is a little taller than her, a little more properly filled out, and his green eyes are not afraid to meet hers. A long, sharp horn juts from his brow, and O wonders how many hearts it has stopped. And the long, thin streak of white that courses down his face—
She can’t help thinking, idly, that it looks like a scar.
He does not expect the blink and stare of that third eye.
The unicorn is not a religious man (he has seen too many more wars than gods). But his people were always superstitious, and magic is a curse word to him, an abomination of power granted to those who should not have it. Who did not deserve it, who did not have the discipline required to wield it.
And so, although he tells himself otherwise, he reads meaning (for good or ill) into the fact that it is she he turned to. A little shiver of unease runs like a cold finger down his spine, but nothing shifts in his green eyes.
After a moment, he turns back to the book, spine stretched and pages weighted like an animal skin pegged for drying. With the tip of his bone-white horn, he taps Isra’s name. “I want to know why she lives,” slowly, precisely, he indicates two more names on the pale page: Acton. Raum.“And why they did not.”
He is asking for the how of it. The story there in ink. But what the unicorn truly wants to know - what he must know - is why.
" I KEEP SEARCHING THE STREETS FOR THAT / BLOOD-WINE BATTLESHIP SHE DRIVES. "
Ah, but foreigners are all so predictable.
And so easy to pick out. She can tell instantly that he is not from here (although, to be fair, the fact that he can’t read should have been the first clue). His kind, strangers from a distant land, are the kind that shrink away at the sight of her third eye, or try too hard to meet its gaze and inadvertently stare; they are the kind whose awkwardness around the sight of magic is palpable.
But this man does not shrink or stare. O resentfully admires him for it—the way he keeps himself stringently together. But even the best actor in the world would flinch a little in surprise, and the way his body tightens like a bowstring tells her that he is not, in fact, the best actor in the world.
He turns away from her. His large, refined head dips toward the pages again, and O watches with cool interest as the bone-white, spear-sharp tip of that weaponous horn skates the page. It is like a pen, O thinks; a pen and a sword all at once. If one is mightier than the other—well, then he is quite lucky to have both.
It points to Isra. Raum. Then: Acton.
O swallows sharply. The third eye squeezes suddenly and violently closed, as if it has seen something it is terribly afraid of; but the other two remain fixed stubbornly on Martell’s green gaze.
“Isra survived,” she muses, “because she found someone who was willing to die for her. Raum and Acton didn’t.” A pause; her mouth works, turning suddenly to the side. “At least, not with them. Not when it all went down. I guess that makes the why of it luck.”
He has heard that sound before, when those in the court or beneath his command have been met with a fact that they don’t want to face. Martell catches her just in time to see her unnatural eye close in way that is no more natural, and of course it makes him wonder.
If he knew her - if he knew anything about this place, including how to read its language - he might have pressed her for why. Instead, he’s forced to ask for help, and so he only listens, trying to school his expression into, if not disinterest, at least neutrality.
“Luck,” he says, and it is almost a snarl, almost a swear word in the way it slips from his lips. Luck, that fickle goddess who every soldier prayed to and cursed - he should have known, such a thing would save Isra. Some fate, he thinks, had always intervened on her behalf.
Martell looks back to the book, as though now it might show him what it had hidden before; as though all those sharp dark lines might converge into meaning. Of course there is nothing, only a page that is already fading.
For now, he ignores the other part - she found someone willing to die for her - though it stirs something black in his heart. “But that can’t be relied on twice.”
His dark mouth is hooked in a frown; the brow above the thin white stripe, like a reverse shadow of his horn, is furrowed. But it smooths, reluctantly, when he lifts his head toward her again.
“Thank you," he says, even as he resents feeling pinned by that third-eye stare.
